Search This Blog

Sunday 28 September 2014

Deafness

In 1755, Abbe Charles Michel de L’Epee of Paris founded the first free school for deaf people. He used a system of gestures, hand signs, and finger spelling.

Beethoven was completely deaf when he composed his Ninth symphony in 1824.

The National Deaf Mute College, later named Gallaudent College was incorporated in Washington DC in 1857. It was the first school in the world for advanced education of the deaf.

Alexander Graham Bell's mother was deaf. His father, Alexander Melville Bell, was a specialist in deaf children's education. He invented "visible speech", a method of phonetic notation for deaf mutes.

Alexander Graham Bell assisted his father in teaching deaf and dumb children in London. When Bell and his family moved to America,  he opened a private school in Boston to train teachers of the deaf and the methods of visible speech he'd learnt from his father.

Paul D. Hubbard was a deaf American football player who played quarterback at Gallaudet University from 1892 to 1895, during which he invented the modern huddle. Hubbard was concerned the other team could interpret his hand signals, so he brought his teammates into a round formation to call plays.

In 2003 British Sign Language was recognized as an official British language.


Deaf babies, and those born to deaf parents, "babble" using their hands during the language-acquisition period.

In the dreams of deaf people, they still don't hear but either the people in their dreams know sign language or all communication is essentially telepathic.

Honeybees and turtles are deaf.

No comments:

Post a Comment